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Impotency   Listen
Impotency

noun
1.
The quality of lacking strength or power; being weak and feeble.  Synonyms: impotence, powerlessness.
2.
An inability (usually of the male animal) to copulate.  Synonym: impotence.






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"Impotency" Quotes from Famous Books



... but without success. The Republic has marched on and on, and its step has exalted freedom and humanity. We are undergoing the same ordeal as did our predecessors nearly a century ago. We are following the course they blazed. They triumphed. Will their successors falter and plead organic impotency in the nation? Surely after 125 years of achievement for mankind we will not now surrender our equality with other powers on matters fundamental and essential to nationality. With no such purpose was the ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... He would try for it ... take it? Day after day the black budget of "falling back", "prisoners", "using up our man-power," put the wind up them to such an extent that they began to curse at their own impotency and helplessness; to fret angrily ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq

... good will and her impotency of means. The utmost exertions of that wealthy city, whose revolutionary band had contributed so much to the downfall of the monarchy in the attack on the Tuilleries, were able to equip only a small and doubtful ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... how is it that in these days such men become rogues? How is it that we see in such frightful instances the impotency of educated men to withstand the allurements of wealth? Men are not now more keen after the pleasures which wealth can buy than were their forefathers. One would rather say that they are less so. The rich labour now, and work with an assiduity that often puts to shame the sweat ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... the aesthetic interest unduly dominates, in which action is transmuted into pulses of sensation, and the means of efficiency into the ends of contemplation, is an idle life, protected from the consequences of its own impotency only by the constructive labor of others. He who from prolonged gazing at the spoon forgets to carry it to his mouth, must die of hunger and cease from gazing altogether, or be fed by his friends. The instruments of achievement may be adorned, and made delightful in ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... peace resulting from a cool and dispassionate appeal to reason, and not from any convictions of right or wrong; it has its origin in the head, and not in the heart. Impotency and policy gave it birth, and impotency, policy and hope keep it alive. It is not inspired by any higher motives than these, and higher motives could hardly be expected to follow immediately in the footsteps of armed insurrection. ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz

... really to maintain her neutrality, since she had been unable to defend her territory from being made a common battleground in 1914: she had been engaged in guarding and perpetuating her traditional impotency. For whilst it may be accurate to declare—a fact which few Westerners have realized—that to the mass of the Chinese nation the various members of the European Family are undistinguishable from one another, there being little to choose in China between a Russian or a German, ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale

... certainly follow, and the whole fine fabric of international law might crumble under our hands piece by piece. What we are contending for in this matter is of the very essence of the things that have made America a sovereign nation. She cannot yield them without conceding her own impotency as a Nation and making virtual surrender of her independent position among the nations of ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff

... on account of the consanguinity or affinity of the parties, or because of impotency, the issue shall be illegitimate, but when on account of non-age, or insanity, or idiocy, the issue is the legitimate issue of the party capable of contracting ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson

... themselves will see that strikes are far more disastrous to them than to any other class, and they will devise other ways and means; they will use the strength of their organizations to better advantage; above all, they will relegate to impotency the professional organizers and agitators who retain their positions by ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... Pennsylvania itself were conforming themselves to the acts of excise, a few counties were resolved to frustrate them. It is now perceived that every expectation from the tenderness which had been hitherto pursued was unavailing, and that further delay could only create an opinion of impotency or irresolution in the Government. Legal process was therefore delivered to the marshal against ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George Washington • George Washington

... the cause of infertility, as with other fruits, is the impotency of pollen on the pistils of the same variety. There are a few cases in which pollen does not seem to be formed abundantly, but these are very few. There are a few cases, also, in which the pistil does not become receptive until after the pollen has lost its vitality; ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick

... accompanied with greater or less inability to perfect seed, so in animals, the same process may be carried far enough to produce sterility. Instances are not wanting, and particularly among the more recent improved Short-horns, of impotency among the males and of barrenness in the females, and in some cases where they have borne calves they have failed to secrete milk for their nourishment.[3] Impotency in bulls of various breeds has not unfrequently occurred from too ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale

... thousand dollars a year in goods to maintain a quasi peace. The settlers are not at any time secure against an Apache outbreak, and there are at the present time some Apaches on the war-path, which the government acknowledges its impotency to capture. "A Century of Dishonor" was a well written book, ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston

... recover from the sense of impotency thus created by being referred to "intuition." Bergson is not the first to try this way out. It would be misleading, no doubt, to identify him with the members of the Scottish School of a hundred years ago or with Jacobi; he reaches his conclusion in another way, and that conclusion ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... airmen were by no means reduced to impotency. On the 15th September we saw them shoot down in flames six of our sausage balloons, all on the sector in front of us and apparently without loss to himself. On other days we saw more of our balloons coming down in flames, but it never seemed to make any ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison

... distinguished Paine, the rebellious Needleman;—some of whom may be chosen. As is most fit; for a Convention of this kind. In a word, Seven Hundred and Forty-five unshackled sovereigns, admired of the universe, shall replace this hapless impotency of a Legislative,—out of which, it is likely, the best members, and the Mountain in mass, may be re-elected. Roland is getting ready the Salles des Cent Suisses, as preliminary rendezvous for them; in that void Palace of the Tuileries, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... Cashmere Singing Girl, The, vi. Goldsmith's wife, The water-carrier and the, v. Hajjaj (Al-) Hind daughter of Al Nu'uman and, vii. Hajjaj (Al-) and the pious man, v. Hakim (The Caliph Al-) and the Merchant, v. Hammad the Badawi, Tale of, ii. Hariri (Al ) Abu Zayd's lament for his impotency. Final Note to vol. viii Harun al-Rashid and the Arab girl, vii. Harun al-Rashid and the Slave-Girl and the Imam Abu Yusuf, iv. Harun al-Rashid with the Damsel and Abu Nowas, iv. Harun al-Rashid and Abu Hasan the Merchant of Oman, ix. Harun al-Rashid and the three girls, v. Harun ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... which exhibited neither nymphae, clitoris, nor urinary meatus. Mauriceau performed nymphotomy on a woman whose nymphae were so long as to render coitus difficult. Morand quotes a case of congenital malformation of the nymphae, to which he attributed impotency. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... conspirator into a private apartment, and for a long time conversed with him alone. Here the tzar had opened before him, in the clearest manner, the intolerable burdens of the people, the oppression of the nobles, the impotency of the laws, the venality of the judges, the corruption which pervaded all departments of the government, legislative, executive and judiciary. The noble conspirator, whose mind was illumined with those views of human rights which, from the French Revolution, were radiating ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott

... had scarcely heard what Cairy had been saying. His sickening sense of failure, of impotency, when he wished most for strength, had been succeeded by rage against the man, not because of his fluent argument, but because of himself; not against his theory of license, but against him. He saw Isabelle's life ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... cutting into the palms till they hurt. The rest of the round, the three long minutes of it, was a succession of clinches and breaks. Not once did Ponta succeed in striking his opponent the deadly final blow. And Ponta was like a madman, raging because of his impotency in the face of his helpless and all but vanquished foe. One blow, only one blow, and he could not deliver it! Joe's ring experience and coolness saved him. With shaken consciousness and trembling body, he clutched and held on, while the ebbing life turned and flooded up ...
— The Game • Jack London

... impotency of unsupported intellect. Ten-talent men have often known more than they would do. The children of genius have not always lived up to their moral light. Burns' mind ran swiftly forward, but his will followed afar off. If the poet's forehead was in the ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... of the king, his brother, and of supporting his own renown, he took a disgust to a position which offered him no issue. Accustomed, hitherto, to rapid and brilliant enterprises, he desponded at his impotency; and already a prey to gnawing cares, which were leading him slowly to the tomb, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... but still without effect, and Mark ground his teeth together as he felt the impotency of his father's efforts now that the enemy had stolen in beyond the gates that would have been admirable ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn

... book,—which I should have seen at all events be sure, whether you had sent it or not. Should I not, do you think? And considering what the present generation of critics really is, the remarks on you may stand, although it is the dreariest impotency to complain of the want of flesh and blood and of human sympathy in general. Yet suffer them to say on—it is the stamp on the critical knife. There must be something eminently stupid, or farewell ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett



Words linked to "Impotency" :   ineffectuality, potence, helplessness, voicelessness, power, quality, impuissance, male erecticle dysfunction, uninterestingness, unpersuasiveness, infertility, impotent, potency, sterility, powerlessness, ineffectiveness, ineffectualness, ED, weakness, paper tiger, erectile dysfunction, powerfulness



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